Appearances can be deceiving – the Gilly sisters may or may not be witches; their salt may or may not be able to foretell the future; and they may or may not bestow a fatal curse on the men they’re connected to – but they certainly will stay in your mind long after you finish The Gilly Salt Sisters, an arresting new novel by Tiffany Baker. Her first, The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (2009), was a New York Times bestseller, and her writing style has been compared to the magical realism of such well-known authors as Alice Hoffman.

Set in the fictional town of Prospect on Cape Cod, the story seems both modern and old-fashioned. Everyone in town is watched over by Our Lady, a faded mural of the Virgin adorning a wall in the town’s tiny church. Her painted face has been missing, according to the old priest, since a nor’easter in 1942 blew in and wiped it clean off, right around the time Jo was born.

Years later, after her mother’s death and her sister Claire’s defection from the family, older sister Jo still works the Gilly Salt Farm and sells the salt locally. The Gilly sisters are apparently both a blessing and a curse on the town’s inhabitants, who fear the family but believe in the power of salt to influence their own futures.

Jo is the witchiest Gilly in some ways, with her reclusive habits and a face scarred from a terrible fire; but Claire’s not far behind, with her flaming red hair and ice-white horse. Not to mention her influential marriage to the Turner family on the hill. Claire married Whit Turner – a man who once seemed to be a sure bet for Jo – after Claire’s true love ran off to join the priesthood. Right there we’ve got trouble, what with the Turner family’s odd dislike for the Gilly family and Claire’s eternal restlessness. She may no longer be stuck working the salt marsh, but she’s mired in a whole lot of unhappiness.

Years pass, and in an ironic tumble, the two sisters get reunited at mid-life, and now live on the farm in an unlikely threesome with Whit’s pregnant mistress. The farm is about on its last legs, and the bank is threatening foreclosure. A tense, troubling atmosphere of secrets begins working itself out, thread by thread, into the light, and if the story occasionally meanders into a fantastical mood, it keeps its feet firmly grounded in a whole bunch of perfectly human flaws, deceits, jealousy and pent-up anger.

The author seems to write from different moods. While the first chapters have a kind of flowery prose that almost flies away, the later pages seem chunkier, slangier, looser in tone, with a modern-day kind of slap. The matter-of-factness of the final plot twists shocked me, and I’m still mulling over whether I might have read it wrong. The placid final pages indicate that the curse may at last be lifted from Salt Creek Farm. I’m not so sure. One thing this book makes clear is that history has a habit of repeating itself. The other is that reading it will fill you with enough salt to last a lifetime.